For six months, we all got used to online conferences, concerts and even corporate parties. Most of these picture activities are a collection of "talking heads". To create a feeling of communication, feedback, energy flows from screen to screen (which, in fact, is the purpose of such events) is still difficult to create even with VK Fest budgets. We tell the story of online corporate events with feedback.
Hi, my name is Anna Netesova, I am the head of event projects at the Engiro Design Bureau, Novosibirsk. KB is the largest agency beyond the Urals in terms of business volume. Federal customers from Moscow and St. Petersburg know us mainly for the projects BoogelWoogel (Rosa Khutor) and GrelkaFest (Sheregesh). These festivals bring together 30,000 people at the ski resorts, so we are used to mass events. Due to the pandemic, both of these projects were canceled a month before the start, and we were, to put it mildly, bored.
First we came up with a "home" festival. Once offline is canceled, we decided, you can have fun online. The idea was to invite the audience of the spring festivals to take part in the festival activities together with the Main Studio. The most important condition for such a project is constant visual and voice feedback from participants, who should have been more than one hundred. We wanted to follow the example of the “senior comrades”, however, after watching all the spring online festivals, we got bored again. In fact, they all represented a beautiful stage, singers singing into the void, "talking heads" and pranks in chat rooms. This option did not suit us, the Siberian soul demanded soulfulness, communication and spectacles.
Under the conditions of quarantine, there was no company that would be ready to finance a turnkey festival startup. But we found those who dared to experiment in a corporate format.
Dancing at a distance
For the purposes of the project, it was necessary to solve technical problems that were not very trivial for May 2020:
- Provide uninterrupted live broadcasting of about 150 people for 6 hours and stable broadcast on the project website page. This means that 150 people without special skills need to very quickly learn how to use the remote conference system, as well as understand why some devices work adequately in such conditions, while others do not. As a result, we have learned to write clear, multi-page instructions.
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As a result, the project setup looked like this.
Conferencing system: TrueConf (manufacturer TrueConf). We stopped at it because:
- the system allows you to fully manage calls by a savvy moderator, practically without the participation of ordinary speakers
- relatively high picture quality
- convenient window moderation
- communication stability
- resistance to hacking, which was important for the corporation
- openness of developers and willingness to help in the project, despite the time difference (when the general run begins in Novosibirsk at 14.00, the self-respecting Moscow call center of support just came to work and is drinking coffee, if you know what I mean).
Video broadcast: Webcaster. What was important was the provider's interest in the atypical project (I’m talking about the time difference again), the stability and the absence of prohibits for using audio tracks. We have a corporate party, but YouTube cannot prove it.
Technique: a standard set of cameras, microphones, 3 video consoles, 3 video servers for video routing, 18 (!!!) PCs for moderators (one for online moderation, one for a conference) and a snake's nest from about a kilometer of commutation.
An important feature of TrueConf Server is a very noticeable traffic consumption, approximately 2-4 Mb / s per user. If you believe the built-in diagnostics, one computer consumed about 30-40 Mb / s of traffic, on the TrueConf server the average flow rate was in the region of 250-300 Mb / s, in peaks up to 400. It is not possible to provide such a channel for reasonable money everywhere, but internal resources of the corporation allowed.
Briefly about the essence of the ether.
- At the festival - remotely, employees have a unique opportunity to visit each other, in fact, to visit. Therefore, we came up with formats within which you could show your sports achievements, pets, children, boast of your cooking skills, etc.
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As a result, we tested the festival platform and held our first online corporate event for 9 Siberian branches, which was watched by 10,500 people from all over the country. For 7 hours of broadcast, there were virtually no technical fakups. The technical director was very surprised and warned that this was temporary.
Don't forget to turn on airplane mode!
A corporate party is not a conference for you, there is no technical and financial opportunity to install light and cameras for all 100+ participants of the broadcast All hope for instructions and gentle and persistent technical moderators. Their task is to prepare speakers in terms of uninterrupted connection, microphones, camera and background, and to convince them that during the broadcast the speaker only works on air. The boss who called at the wrong time or an unclosed browser window can "take out" the participant at the most interesting moment for him and for the audience.
A prerequisite for technically complex projects, in which several dozen non-professionals are involved, is a dress rehearsal. On which all the actors go on the air in the order in which they will do it at the event itself, and the broadcast is carried out exactly in the configuration in which it will take place in real life - with sound, light and presenters.
Leading the run is another tool for the psychological comfort of the project. They need to get to know the participants and simulate the challenges that will fall on their lot online. This helps to boost employee morale and greatly enhances the personal responsibility for connecting on time.
No matter how sorry for the time and money, technical and general runs with full imitation of sound, light, connections, broadcast are a necessity, and we spend 2 days on it
Quotes from the working chat:
- It's uncomfortable to jump with headphones!
- Tomsk is worried that it is not visible
- Explain how to remove mirroring
- Between tomorrow and now 40 minutes!
Simultaneous YouTube Session
Inspired, we took on the next project, an online awards ceremony. The task was ambitious: in 3 hours to award 300 people in 9 branches, and everyone should feel like on a conditional "pedestal" - that is, shown in close-up, congratulated personally by the head and has the opportunity to say the answer. We repeated the previous configuration with moderators and conferences, but decided to make awards in branches parallel, with occasional broadcasts of the Main Studio on the air of each conference. At the same time, a composite picture from the Main Studio was broadcast on the main site, and 9 conferences-awards of branches could be viewed on YouTube.
Still, all conferences had to see and hear the main studio in realtime for live communication. And we made the task more complicated: each awards ceremony inside the conference was supposed to be a "small corporate party" with a video showing and a presenter.
It turned out that in order to provide all this and a more or less beautiful picture in the conditions of Novosibirsk stocks of equipment, all 9 conference moderators must at least master OSB Studio, as well as learn how to switch audio signal sources. Since the usual “Screen sharing” format did not completely solve the problem of broadcasting video content with sound on the air of the conference.
Why? Because we wanted to display pure content, without system icons, notifications, etc., and also allow the moderator to have a relatively simple (click-and-run) way to manipulate the content.
This time, the tech gods left us for a while. The biggest pitfall of concurrent streaming and universal online was the sound of the Main Studio, which jammed all conferences on YouTube broadcasts. In general, the story with the distribution of audio and video streams in this whole story is the most laborious and, let's say, requiring the imagination of the technical director. Each configuration requires a new wiring diagram for the equipment, and the main limiting factor is the number of required outputs on the device. But we are already involved. Technical problems did not prevent us from increasing the audience for awarding employees by about 10 times - for 300 nominees, we received almost 3000 views.
Hybrid future
Now we have 5 online corporate events "behind us", the sixth and seventh are on the way. Almost all of them are built on the very first technology platform that we call LiveDigital. And, honestly, we have not yet found the best solution for involving people in the process. Attempts to implement such solutions at private events inside Zoom or Instagram were in Moscow and, oddly enough, in Irkutsk, but they did not become serial. Although, as it seems to us, there is great potential here.
After six months of forced online, it is clear that the future belongs to hybrid projects. Sisters from Kansas and grandfathers from Zheleznogorsk-Ilimsky, Irkutsk Region, want to take an active part in weddings. A corporate event for a modern distributed company is a tool to unite staff, so employees happily living and working in Limassol should also participate.
What is sorely lacking in event business for an adequate transition to online? That's right, personal communication and everything connected with it, as well as an adequate price solution. The mass market cannot afford to build a studio, install an iron machine, or hire editors. Even a simple comparison of the cost of organizing a regular event with a “talking head” versus LiveDigital is not yet in favor of the latter.
If we do not focus on VR and American conference applications simulating the game SIMS (this is expensive, we looked), then we would highlight the following trends, which, in our opinion, should not be underestimated by conferencing software developers.
- Maximum possibility of "virtual-live" presence, and from both sides. The speaker must see and possibly hear the audience, the audience must see the speaker or artist. In a convenient and beautiful interface. Only then, when watching online concerts, the feeling that the artist half the time convinces himself that there are thousands of fans around him will disappear.
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Moreover, since remote speakers, by definition, lose to those who are nearby, they should have unique opportunities that offline guests do not have. The option "turn off the screen" does not count.
Zoom has now taken a step in this direction by announcing Zapps , so there is hope for streamlining workflows. In parallel, online analogs of offline games are developing, which are rapidly gaining popularity, see Among Us, Kahoot and analogs. It is quite possible that very soon we will be able to play the mafia in the images of Jack Sparrow or Elon Musk.